Dropbox scam making the rounds, here’s how to work out what’s fake

Every so often, a scam or a virus makes its way into the GadgetGuy inbox, and we get to see what other people get to see in order to help you understand it. Today, it’s one of those days, so if you see a Dropbox scam, here’s what not to do.

Don’t under any circumstances get tricked by it.

That’s what not to do, so let’s help you understand how not to get tricked by examining the email scam piece by piece, starting with the scam itself:

That’s an email someone sent our way, and while it looks like a semi convincing Dropbox file sharing email, there are some things worth checking out, so let’s go through this the way a security aware person would.

First, we hover over the link and see what pops up:

The link you see here — which we’ve never seen before — is not Dropbox. Not by a long shot.

Whoever has engineered this hasn’t done much work to hide it, and in other scams, you might see a similar name to Dropbox in the domain — maybe droopbox or drapbox or DRQPBOX, just enough to confuse you.

No, here the scammers have been pretty lazy, and are redirecting you to a site that looks nothing like Dropbox in the name, but will still try and convince you regardless.

Always hover over a link in an email you’re not sure about and check where it’s actually taking you to. Just because it has the name of a company you recognise does not mean it’s real.

When we click on the link, here’s what we see:

Well, that looks like Dropbox, but there are some clues to this being a fake.

One is the URL at the top of the screen, which like the link we hovered on before, looks like this: